Kristian Ferrell
Throughout history, there have been numerous discoveries and inventions that have changed the course of humanity. Some of the most notable discoveries include electricity by Benjamin Franklin, penicillin by Alexander Fleming, radium by Marie and Pierre Curie, and the jet stream by Wasaburo Oishi. Other groundbreaking inventions include the airplane by the Wright brothers, the first electronic television by Philo T. Farnsworth, and revolutionary hair care treatments for Black women by Madam C.J. Walker. These pioneers and their discoveries have paved the way for modern innovations and improved the lives of countless individuals worldwide.
| Characteristics | Values |
|---|---|
| Inventors | Thomas Edison, Madam C.J. Walker, John Deere, Steve Jobs, Orville Wright, Philo T. Farnsworth, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Fleming, Michael Sendivogius, Robert Boyle, Edme Mariotte, Pierre Janssen, Norman Lockyer, Per Teodor Cleve, Nils Abraham Langlet, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, Julius Lothar Meyer, Bolesław Prus, Christopher Kasparek, Georgios Papanikolaou, Aurel Babeş, Alexander Oparin, J.B.S. Haldane, Wasaburo Oishi, Wiley Post, Alfred Mirsky, Linus Pauling, Hsien Wu, Oleg Losev, H.J. Round, Georges Destriau, George Zipf, Felix Auerbach, Jean-Baptiste Estoup, Godfrey Dewey, Edward U. Condon, Gerhard Gentzen, Stanisław Jaśkowski |
| Discoveries | Lightbulb, Universal Stock Printer, Quadruplex Telegraph, Phonograph, Airplane, Television, Electricity, Penicillin, Oxygen, Boyle's Law, Helium, Periodic Table, Pap Test, Jet Stream, LED, Natural Deduction, Radium, X-rays, Radioactivity |
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What You'll Learn
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin
Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming is best known for his discovery of penicillin in 1928, which started the antibiotic revolution. Born on August 6, 1881, at Lochfield Farm near Darvel, in Ayrshire, Scotland, Alexander Fleming was the third of four children of farmer Hugh Fleming and Grace Stirling Morton. After working in a shipping office for four years, the twenty-year-old Alexander Fleming inherited some money from an uncle, John Fleming. His elder brother, Tom, a physician, suggested that he should follow the same career, and so in 1903, the younger Alexander enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington (now part of Imperial College London). He qualified with distinction in 1906 and began research at St. Mary's under Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy. He gained M.B., B.S., (London), with Gold Medal in 1908, and became a lecturer at St. Mary's until 1914.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin was a chance event. In 1928, Fleming returned from a holiday to find a Petri dish containing a culture of Staphylococcus bacteria contaminated by a fungus. He noticed that the mould seemed to be preventing the bacteria around it from growing. He soon identified that the mould produced a self-defence chemical that could kill bacteria. He named the substance penicillin.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin kickstarted a 20-year-long journey to develop the world's first mass-produced drug that could clear a bacterial infection. However, his efforts to purify the unstable compound from the extract proved beyond his capabilities. For a decade, no progress was made in isolating penicillin as a therapeutic compound. During that time, Fleming sent his Penicillium mould to anyone who requested it, hoping that they might isolate penicillin for clinical use.
Howard Florey, at the University of Oxford, working with Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley, successfully took penicillin from the laboratory to the clinic as a medical treatment in 1941. On February 12, 1941, a 43-year-old policeman, Albert Alexander, became the first recipient of the Oxford penicillin. He had developed a life-threatening infection from a cut and made a remarkable recovery within days.
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Orville and Wilbur Wright discovered how to fly
Orville and Wilbur Wright, born in Indiana and Ohio respectively, are credited with discovering how to fly. They were two of seven children born to a clergyman, Milton Wright, and his wife, Susan Catherine Koerner. Their father's position as a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ saw the family move around frequently.
The Wright brothers' interest in flying was sparked by a toy helicopter their father brought home for his two younger sons in 1878. The device was based on an invention by French aeronautical pioneer Alphonse Pénaud. After it broke, Wilbur and Orville built their own. They also pointed to their experience with the toy as the spark of their interest in flying.
The brothers gained the mechanical skills essential to their success by working for years in their Dayton, Ohio-based shop with printing presses, bicycles, motors, and other machinery. They capitalized on the national bicycle craze and opened a repair and sales shop, the Wright Cycle Exchange, later the Wright Cycle Company, in 1892. They used this endeavor to fund their growing interest in flight.
From 1900 until their first powered flights in late 1903, the brothers conducted extensive glider tests that also developed their skills as pilots. Their first successful self-propelled sustained flight was on December 17, 1903, in a manned heavier-than-air powered and controlled aircraft called the Wright Flyer. The aircraft was a single-place biplane design with anhedral (drooping) wings, a front double elevator (a canard), and a rear double rudder. It used a 12-horsepower gasoline engine powering two pusher propellers. The Wright brothers' system of aircraft controls made fixed-wing powered flight possible and remains standard on airplanes of all kinds.
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Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity
Benjamin Franklin, born on January 17, 1706, was a Founding Father of the United States, a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher. He is known for his diverse accomplishments, including his work in civic, scientific, and cultural projects that greatly influenced the course of American history.
While Benjamin Franklin did not discover electricity, he made significant contributions to the understanding of it. On a stormy June afternoon in 1752, Franklin conducted his famous kite experiment. He flew a kite with a key attached to its string to demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning. Franklin's experiment verified that lightning carries a powerful electrical charge, and he invented the lightning rod to protect buildings from lightning strikes.
Before Franklin's scientific experimentation, it was believed that electricity consisted of two opposing forces. However, Franklin's work demonstrated that electricity was a "'common element' he called "electric fire," and that it was fluid-like and passed from one body to another without being destroyed. He also coined new electrical terms, some of which are still used today.
Franklin's kite experiment has become a well-known story, but the details of the event remain uncertain. Historians question the accuracy of popular depictions and accounts, including whether Franklin's kite and key were struck by lightning. Franklin's own description of the experiment was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in October 1752, providing instructions for recreating it.
Franklin's work in electricity was just one aspect of his multifaceted life, which included scientific, political, and literary achievements that continue to be honored and remembered.
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Maria and Pierre Curie discovered radium
Maria Skłodowska-Curie, known as Marie Curie, was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867 and began her scientific career in Paris, studying the magnetic properties of steel. She met Pierre Curie in 1894, and they married in 1895. Pierre was a French physicist, radiochemist, and a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity.
Marie and Pierre Curie shared a passion for science, and their early research was often performed under difficult conditions with poor laboratory arrangements. They were inspired by Henri Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity in 1896 and subsequently conducted pioneering work on the theory of "radioactivity", a term they coined. This led to the isolation of polonium, which Marie named after her native country, Poland, and radium.
Marie developed methods for separating radium from radioactive residues, allowing for its characterization and the study of its properties, particularly its therapeutic potential. She actively promoted the use of radium in medicine, and during World War I, she devoted herself to remedial work using radium. The Curies' discovery of radium and its potential applications laid the foundation for much of the subsequent research in nuclear physics and chemistry.
In recognition of their groundbreaking research, Marie and Pierre Curie were jointly awarded half of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. They became the first married couple to win a Nobel Prize, and their work has had a lasting impact on the scientific community, with the unit of measurement for the intensity of radioactive material being named the "Curie" in their honour.
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Thomas Edison discovered the lightbulb
Thomas Alva Edison is often credited as the inventor of the lightbulb. However, it is essential to recognise that he built upon the work of several previous inventors and continued to refine his design with the help of his associates. Edison's work on the lightbulb was part of a broader interest in electric power generation and mass communication, which led to several other inventions.
Edison was born in Ohio in 1847 and received most of his education at home, where he set up a laboratory in the basement. He moved to New York and established a laboratory in Newark, New Jersey, in 1875, where he continued his work on the telegraph and invented the universal stock ticker. Edison's entrepreneurial spirit and innovative ideas led him to found several companies, including General Electric, and establish the first industrial research laboratory.
In 1876, Edison opened a new laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he and his associates worked on developing an efficient incandescent lamp. Incandescent lamps use electricity to heat a thin strip of material called a filament until it glows. Edison and his team experimented with various materials for the filament, including cotton and linen thread, wood splints, and paper coiled in different ways. They eventually discovered that a carbonised bamboo filament could last over 1,200 hours.
Edison patented his design for the incandescent lightbulb in 1879 and began commercialising it in 1880. He also developed related inventions, such as the first electric meter to track electricity usage, that made the use of lightbulbs more practical. Edison's work on the lightbulb and his other inventions had a widespread impact on the modern industrialised world, and he is remembered as one of the most well-known inventors of all time.
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Frequently asked questions
Most people give credit to Benjamin Franklin for discovering electricity.
Alexander Fleming is credited with discovering penicillin in 1928.
Radium was discovered by Maria and Pierre Curie in 1898.
French astronomer Pierre Janssen and English astronomer Norman Lockyer independently discovered helium in 1868.
